Tempted though I am to do some sort of April the Fool joke tomorrow I will resist..... and get down to the serious business of Alpacas and the recent spate of infections which appear to be going around.

Here is a very interesting piece from Sandy Wallace:

As a human Infectious Diseases MD specialist involved with Infection Control at several major hospitals, I have the following comments:

It is absolutely believable that this is an outbreak of Coronavirus. That's far more likely than the parasites mentioned. However, it is not uncommon, particularly in developing countries, for a viral or bacterial acute diarrheal illness to allow the shedding of parasites that were living in "peaceful co-existence" in the gut. I think that explains why Sandra's vet found various parasites on fecal exam. Maybe the outbreak is really due to some other virus or viruses, but the pattern and nature of the illness is consistent with viral disease.

I agree that we are probably utilizing antibiotic preparations way too frequently, and the wiser course would be to support with fluids and electrolytes. However, that's easy for me to say, as my animals are agisted and I know a whole lot more about taking care of sick people than taking care of sick alpacas! I am impressed by the lack of similarity between camelids and people--you have no way of knowing if a medication is going to be absorbed from one of the "stomachs", and how much damage it may do.

Most likely this was spread by fecal-oral contamination, and much less likely the water in Phoenix. Someone mentioned the beginning of diarrhea at an even earlier show in Texas. Having watched the vet check-in procedures and owner laxity at some shows, it's hard to believe that we don't have more such outbreaks (and I have been guilty of this, as well!). It really is imperative that we insist on certain hygeinic standards for AOBA shows--at the 2007 AlpacaFest West I think we stepped up to the proverbial plate, and only a few people complained about the check-in procedures. All animals were examined by the vets in their trailers before off-loading, so as not to contaminate other animals. It's safe to assume that all animals on one trailer have common exposures. The vets wore impermeable cover gowns, gloves, and booties, which were removed and disposed of after each trailer, and the ground on which the vet stood while removing the garments was disinfected. There was strict limitation of the number of people to have direct physical contact with the animals on each trailer, basically one vet and the driver. There was liberal use of alcohol-based hand gel. I think that in general, with the recent/ongoing snots outbreak, owners were more cautious about letting their animals have physical contact with animals from other farms. A facility was available for housing symptomatic animals, away from the show area.

It may well be a co-incidence, but I don't think there were any reports of illness related to AFW 2007, despite the sever outbreak of snots that led up to it.

Thanks,

By all means, share my comments with anyone you want to. My additional suggestion for hygiene at the shows would be for the alpaca judges to put on a fresh pair of gloves before examining each rear end of an animal. The steward could carry a box of gloves and bag for the used gloves. This would add only an additional 15 seconds to the examination of each animal. Only the handler should show the teeth. Of course, the judge would not glove for the rest of the examination, but I think the fleece is far less contaminated than the front and rear ends, and the judge must be able to do a thorough evaluation of the fleece.

Just when we thought it was safe to put away the hay feeders and water trough heaters the temperature dropped several degrees and a snow storm swept through the valley.


The show didn't last and was all gone from the lower levels by the middle of the day. The local mountain which is where the locals ski was i am sure very glad of the fresh powder.



Well off to check the drinking water troughs and make sure all is well.

Tomorrow lunchtime a good friend and fellow alpaca breeder is dropping off her female and then on Tuesday I will take her and my own female up to Portland for breedings. There is always something going on.

If you went to the following show or know someone who did please cut and paste this blog entry into your e-mail and send it on. Thank you.

SouthWest Regional Alpaca Show
March 7th - 9th 2008
Arizona State Fairgrounds ~ Phoenix, Arizona

Did you show animals at SWRAS? How many?
Did you show at IAO? How many?
Did your herd come down with the diarrhea?
How many days after the show conclusion did your animal(s) exhibit symptoms?
How long was the first animal sick?
Did you isolate/quarantine (NO nose to nose contact) your show animals?
Did the symptoms jump the herd with no nose to nose contact?
If you did not quarantine did others of your herd get sick?
Did any animals appear immune?
Was there any peculiar history behind that animal (east coast born, etc...)?
Did you medicate? With what meds? With what result?
Did you have a vet visit? What was the diagnosis? Did the vet treat w/meds? Which?
Did you send a fecal sample for testing? Result?
When was the last day that the last sick animal exhibit symptoms?
What was the most extreme symptom?
Did any animals taken to either show not exhibit symptoms? Any peculiarities with that animal?

Send responses to forum@calpaca.org.

Plenty of discussion going on in the alpaca community right now about the reporting and control of infectious diseases especially at alpaca shows. here are some of the ideas that we all need to mull over.

The problem(s):

1. Spread of infectious disease (BVD, upper respiratory, diarrhea, etc.) through various sources:
Shows & Events
Transport
Vet Hospital stays
Ranch visitors, Ranch events
Incoming alpacas for boarding or breeding

a. Lack of knowledge about identifying disease outbreak and understanding how a particular disease is transmitted.
1st Snots, now “Splots”.

b. Lack of science regarding causes/sources of infectious disease affecting alpacas.

c. Lack of Medical Alert System.

Possible Solutions:
(Remember this is brainstorming stage….all ideas are OK to state, but all will not be OK in the final analysis to implement.)

The following ideas were derived from shared emails and this process is still in progress…..

1.Understanding Cause:

Pin pointing origin.

This may be next to impossible, but some detective minded researcher might delve into tracking outbreaks.

Determining carriers.

Wandering small animals - (pets, guardian dogs, birds, wild critters) with access to pens and pastures.
Humans - via feet, hands, clothing, tools.
Water – drinking, washing
Airborne. - Wind and one suggestion was: fans blowing at shows.

2.Having all shows donate some of their profits to ARF for research on improving show health.

3.Setting standard for quarantine and isolation at all shows as part of AOBA Show Rules.

•Once several trailers arrive showing evidence of infection, begin Medical Alert process and even shut down show, since some arriving animals, like at IAO, were ill but not showing signs yet. Don’t assume simple stress. Do assume infection.
•Have off site quarantine areas prepared in advance. If on site, screened, with signs alerting the public…made off limits.
•Establish standard and strict bio security measures for all vet checks.
•Don’t allow animals to enter show after vet check has closed.

4.Education for show attendees on bio security measures used by show and to be used by all participants.

5.Create list of recommended show participant first aide kit contents for alleviating stress symptoms.

6.Link all vets used by our members, so that they can confer with each other directly during an outbreak. Name, phone, email. We can create the network for them.

7.Show vets to have full arsenal of meds available, plus access to our vet network.

8.Shows to include at least one herd maintenance supply vendor at each show….or info available in show program noting where closest farm supply store is located.

9.Check water at venues and consider decontamination of site from prior use by other species.

10.Last two shows to determine and then share number and general locations of farms/ranches affected by latest outbreak, which began after SWRAZ, to determine the extent and timing of the infection in our regional herds.

11.Ongoing education of show administration, vets, judges, owners and the public for bio-security measures to implement in order to protect the health and well being of our alpaca population, not to mention our pocket books.

12.Not scheduling back to back shows in same area…leaving at least two weeks in between dates to allow time for any infection to be caught and contained. Some animals got ill early after AZ and scratched ahead of IAO, others didn’t show signs of illness until they had arrived at the show and then others got the problem after IAO. Show management needs to take appropriate action when participants begin cancelling due to illness, even if only day before others are set to arrive.)

I have received the following information from Dave and Sandra Wallace of Alpacas at Crossroads Ranch. Which I am posting here as I feel it is important to spread the word about what appears to be happening.......

This past week, members of SoCalpaca have been sharing their experience of contagious diarrhea that has jumped quarantine pens to affect home herds (beginning about 3/21 last week), after members having gone to SWRAZ (3/6-9), and/or IAO (3/13-16) the following week.

We’re engaged in taking a survey to determine the scope of the problem and possible causes. One ranch has reported that sample test sent to U.C. Davis came back positive for Corona Virus. We’re checking with all our vets on this.

We began by sharing our on site situations to define the problem and have now moved on to brainstorming for solutions before determining actions that our industry needs to take.

As part of our solutions discussion, we’ve agreed to open sharing our emails on a broader scale. We began with speaking among ourselves directly, as many do not read Alpaca Site for varying reasons and Alpaca Watch was contacted first, but a form email came back in return with no follow up, so that was not timely and didn’t work.

I will send our composite emails to those who are interested, if you ask. Our goal is to determine the scope of the current problem and work together to improve the situation we find ourselves in.

Since I’ve been working with professionals in our State on Disaster Preparedness, as part of my participation in the Affiliate Congress as representative for SoCalpaca, this is a good time to share some key points I’ve learned recently.

As per Red Cross: Prepare
Plan
Stay Informed

As I have said previously genetic factors are essential in creating breeding improvement among livestock including alpacas, and different alpacas will vary in their ability to deliver genetic improvement to their cria.
Using EPDs it is however possible to measure that ability across a range of characteristics, and discover which alpacas are most likely to pass on their genetic merit in any given trait to their progeny.
This is achieved by gathering performance and pedigree data, collating these records, and applying a genetic analysis program to produce Expected Progeny Differences. This approach has been used in the Australian and New Zealand alpaca market for some years now. So here is a quick summary of what is happening.

AGE and alpaca genetic improvement
In 2003 the Australian Alpaca Association (AAA) introduced an Across-herd Genetic Evaluation service, called AGE to maximise the genetic improvement within members herds.
A broad range of 27 optional traits can be recorded and analysed to ensure all members' breeding objectives can be assisted. Private (and Public) reports allow both breeders and commercial fleece producers to take advantage of the information produced by the AGE service.
The following year in 2004 the AGE Project was rolled out to members of the Alpaca Association New Zealand (AANZ) who already had the necessary pedigree data.

Breeding improvement
Traditionally, alpaca breeding advances in Australia and New Zealand have been based on show results, on-farm appraisal, and pedigree records or blood lines as they are often called.

AGE is administered by the AAA and the AGE genetic analysis is conducted by Advanced Breeding Services, Orange NSW, a commercial arm of the NSW Department of Primary Industry. It is linked to the combined databases enabling an extremely powerful selection tool that is revolutionising genetic improvement for alpaca breeders in the Australasian alpaca market.

Tomorrow I will talk some about the results and you will be able to see those results for yourself in the Mulberry Alpacas Library.

E-mail marketing
Welcome to this the penultimate blog entry on the creation of highly effective alpaca marketing websites. So far we have covered; creating an identity for your farm, title tags, content, links, images, website URL, blogs and yesterday I talked about usability.

Today I want to talk about e-mail and mailing lists:
The easiest way to start this is to always ask yourself who, what, where, when and how?

Who are you going to send your mailshot to?
What are you going to ask them to do?
Where on the web will they go?
When are you going to do it?
How will you get them to do what you ask?

There are of course many answers to these questions and not just one correct answer. So play around and see what happens.

You can be direct and say "Come look at the alpacas I have for sale." Those people who click through will only be the ones who really want to look at your alpacas.

Or you can be less direct and say "Would you like to win a book about alpacas? - Then visit my website and enter the competition." The way I do this is to then to ask people to answer a simple question about one of the alpacas that I have for sale. Of all the people who enter one lucky winner is picked at random.

I really like this appproach. Firstly its fun and I like the idea that our alpaca farm is asssociated with enjoyment. Secondly, all the people who visit the site have to look at the alpacas for sale in order to answer the quiz question - this is of course my real goal -

I am sure you will have great ideas of your own, as I say there really are many ways to do this and not just one correct answer.

The best source of email addresses for this is the AOBA sales lead campaign. These sales leads are generated by AOBA and then have to be purchased by the AOBA membership. The leads come out each month and you should contact them as soon as possible. Over time you will build up a significant list of leads, otherwise known as people who are interested in buying alpacas. Any that reply to you directly MUST be tracked individually the remainder should be contacted at regular intervals say once each quarter. You can always break your master list down into three parts and contact one part every month. This helps spread out the work of following up on replies and creates a good monthly cycle to your marketing activities.

If you don't want to buy the AOBA sales leads then you need to generate your own leads. You can do this by having a newsletter sign up page on your website and keeping a visitors book on your stand when you attend shows or go to exhibitions. It will take much longer but you wont be sharing your leads with other ranches. which is of course what happens when you take the AOBA leads.

These aren't the only two options your affiliate may generate mailings lists or you can rent or buy mailing lists.

As with many things in life "you pays your money and you takes your choice..."

Don't Forget the Humans

This is so important, it probably should be higher up on the list to be honest. On the other hand it should be so obvious it probably shouldn't even be on the list at all!
There's an art to designing a site that is friendly to both Google crawlers and the people you ultimately want to buy alpacas. Without people, what's the point? So first design for them, and then tweak to please the spiders, not the other way around. Jakob Nielsen is a web usability guru you'll want to check out. He's been telling people how to make user friendly websites since the this whole web thing got started.

As an illustration ask yourself; How difficult is it to perform a search on Google?

Jakob is not talking about the challenge of formulating a good query, interpreting the results, or revising your search strategy to reap better results. Those are all very complicated research skills, and few people excel at them.

He is talking only about the very first step in searching the Web: Getting to your favorite search engine so that you can run a search there.

Would you say this is easy or difficult? Think a bit before reading on.

**** think about it ****

If you thought it's easy to get to Google, think again. In Jakob Nielsen's current round of web usability research, only 76% of users who expressed a desire to run a Google search were successful. In other words, 1/4 of users who wanted to use Google couldn't do so. (Instead, they either completely failed to get to any search engine or ended up running their query on a different search engine — usually whatever type-in field happened to be at hand.)

Jakob Nielsen doubts that any Web designer would be incapable of running a Google search and I have to agree with him. So, the fact that 1/4 of users can't do it is a striking demonstration that you can't rely on your own experience if you want to reach a broader audience. Remember this when designing your web alpaca marketing site and when reviewing the work of others. If in doubt use unsuspecting friends and family to test out what you have produced, you will be shocked by the number of times what was obvious to you was not at all intuitive for your audience.

Next time you are sat in an alpaca meeting take a look around and it requires no imagination to believe that 1 in 4 of the people in the room don't know-how to use Google well enough to look for your adorable alpacas...... so bear this in mind when you build your web alpaca web site.

Start a Blog

A great way to establish yourself as someone who knows about alpacas is to start a blog about your farm or some aspect of the alpaca industry you're involved with. Maintaining a blog means another entry point with regularly updated content that eventually with some authority helps pull up the main site via targeted links to the site, or specific pages within the site. It's not a spam blog, which will be zapped eventually, if there's useful content on it and legitimate linking.

My blog is one of several alpaca blogs and fairly popular but by no means perfect and I do tend to wander around the subject matter and sadly I have had to suspend comments due to the massive amount of spam mail I was receiving in the comments section of my blog.

There are packages around to help you do this such as Wordpress and I use one called Serendipity.

Surf around the web and look at some alpaca blogs. A blog doesn't have to be daily or even weekly so do it as often as it feels good. I post everyday out of habit but as a result the quality of my postings can vary considerably. Its a bit like the news channels running 24 hours...they have to find content all day to fill up the airwaves.

Website Name

The website name or URL as it is known in the trade is pretty important.
The importance of the URL is often debated, but one argument seems to make more sense than the others. Search engines don't like too many parameters in the URL (easy to confuse the spiders with & and ?) and people can't read those long URLs and tell what they mean at a glance either. The people aspect here is especially important, because they're the ones clicking and they need to understand where a link will take them in the blink of an eye.
Therefore: keywords in the URL are a good idea and the best keyword is - alpacas - hence my own choice of URL which is www.mulberryalpacas.com .

You should be able to create a URL that includes your farm name and the word - alpacas - without having to buy anything.

The piece that comes after the name is called the top level domain and by far the most popular is .com but there are others such as .biz .net .org and so forth in fact there are hundreds so if you want to check them all out go here.

On balance I would use .com if at all posible because that is what people type as a default...... if you are a .net you might just miss out on some traffic when people forget and type .com.
Having said all of that if you are a cooperative (See the Rochdale Principles) then go for .coop

So you could even create a web site www.alpaca-fiber.coop if you wanted to......

Images

Today I wanted to talk (and show) about the images you put onto your alpaca website or blog. And I must start this entry with a caveat, just as the cobblers children never have any shoes my own website is not perfect when it comes to images. I have two excuses; firstly what I now know I didn't know when I built the web site and secondly there over 1000 images on the site so any re-labelling exercise would be substantial. Do as I say not as I do!

Now that digital cameras are readily available and affordable it is within everyone's ability to snap some pictures of their alpacas. Why pictures? Well if a picture is worth a thousand words. Then a (good) picture of an alpaca is probably the difference between selling and not selling one of your animals.

Having snapped the picture and loaded it onto your PC you now have the opportunity to improve and enhance that picture still further...and most of us need that opportunity. In fact this is the stage where professionals spend most of their time and effort.

You may well have heard about a software package called Photo Shop but to my mind that software is way beyond what is required by most alpaca farmers. Your digital camera may well have come with a software disk and if this does everything you need then that's great. If not I recommend an inexpensive and easy to use package called ACD See. The Pro version is $129 and money well spent. Here is an example of why:





As you can see I have removed what I call the visual distractions, the houses, fences other alpacas and so forth, then cropped the photo so that the alpaca occupies the full picture. This took me about 15 minutes or so from beginning to end, time well spent. In fact I actually enjoy doing this stuff now I know the software and what it can do.

The final piece is that every alpaca image on your web site has Alt Text associated with it and you need to make sure every image on your site is correctly labelled so a clear and unique description is required.

For example calling every image - alpaca - or labelling them - 34562.jpg - is no good.

What you need is - Flossy a friendly alpaca - or something similar. The word alpaca needs to be in there and ithe decsription must be unique.

Welcome to this the fourth in a series of blog articles on how to build a world class alpaca web site or enhance your existing alpaca website. As the webmaster of a new alpaca site, there are several things you must do. First, you need to create a genuinely useful website filled with equally useful and informative alpaca releated content. You need to ready yourself to add fresh content on a frequent basis, in order to retain existing site visitors and to attract the search engine spiders. You also need to start building links – a good link profile takes time to develop so it is essential that you start as soon as possible.

Quality Links

Or more specifically, back-links, links to your alpaca web site from outside sources. Links are your letters of recommendation. If no-body's recommending you, or the recommendations seem phony, then it won't work. Authority (high quality) links are weighted most heavily, of course, so try to get industry-related authority sites to link to your site. I know its not easy ...but I am sure your mother told you that the things in life that are worth having are never easy.

Quantity Links

Authority (high quality) links are by nature more difficult to get, so you'll have to start somewhere else unless you already have the brand recognition you need from square one. Some people propose "link-swaps" to each other and it used to be common place to buy and sell links. But as Google demonstrated last Fall, you can't buy Google's admiration that way. In fact, you'll get punished. So, get as many links as you can from alpaca industry peers the good old-fashioned way – by promoting. Submit links to respected directories like DMOZ and Yahoo, as well. A word of caution, a large burst of low-quality, irrelevant, or bad-neighborhood links, though, can do a lot more harm than good; so keep things natural.

Avoid Any Dubious Link Building Practice
If you see a link building opportunity that looks dodgy, ignore it. At best you will waste your time, but at worst your site could be penalized and you may never be able to recover. If it looks too good to be true... well you know the rest.

I think tomorrow we will talk about design, but that depends on what you my readers want to hear about. So unless I hear otherwise it will be the whole aspect of designing alpaca marketing websites that human beings enjoy visiting.

Follow these to pervious Alpacas Marketing articles:

Marketing Alpacas Getting Started

Marketing Alpacas on the Web Title Tags

Marketing Alpacas on the Web Great Content

Okay here is the third article in this series about creating a highly effective alpaca marketing website.

Text or Content

The order of what is known as the Big Three (Tags, Links and Text) is a topic of much debate, but really they work as parts of the whole; you can think of each one as a leg on the stool, each one is essential and no one leg is more important than the other two. You probably understand that the text, or content as it gets called, needs to be quality, however that is defined, it should also be rich in the keywords you are targeting to drive search traffic.

That doesn't mean just throwing the keywords in there like confetti at a wedding, though. Keyword use and keyword variation should be natural and not overstuffed. For the text part of the page, focus on working in the relevant words and phrases you want people to find you for. Such as: alpacas for sale in southern Oregon.

John Merrell runs one of the most visited alpaca web sites and he will always put content / text at the top of his list for web site importance. John's view is that you can play around with links and blogs all you like but at the end of the day in the long haul content will win. Perhaps the best example of this is the web site for North West Alpacas which is stuffed full of relevant, interesting and useful content.

Remember Google cannot see or read images so you must label them using whats called the Alt Text. The Alt text appears when you scroll your mouse over an image and a small sentence or phrase opens up ideally describing the image. Any text on top of an image is also invisible to Google. With this in mind think very carefully about making images the links from a web page, much better to use relevant text. That makes it much easier for the web spiders to follow. The spiders are programmes sent out by Google and the other search engines to read your web site and index the content (pages). Being spidered does not however mean your content is instantly indexed there is often a delay between being spidered and the indexing and then the update of the various Google databases around the world.

Tomorrow we will be looking at links in more detail as that is the third leg of our SEO stool.

Here are the two previous Alpacas Marketing articles

Marketing Alpacas - Getting Started

Marketing Alpacas on the Web - Title Tags

Firstly a snippet of alpaca industry news...2008 AOBA National Conference registration is open! So you can join north American alpaca breeders in Sandy, Utah for the AOBA National Conference. May 21- 25 2008, the theme this year will be

"Everything You Want To Know About Alpacas".

According to AOBA the conference promises to be an exciting time with the national halter show, national fleece show, fiber arts, auction, vendors, annual gala banquet with Bob Eubanks and a broad range of educational seminars.......sadly the educational seminars have yet to be decided………so how do we know it will be a broad range? We just trust!

Marketing Alpacas

Well back to the real world and the second in my series on marketing alpacas........ in particular the creation of a business busting alpaca marketing web site.

You might recall that I said yesterday that having a farm name with the word alpacas in there is pretty much the only way to go. Therefore you need to be thinking about something on the lines of say Mulberrry Alpacas Because for your web site you want a URL or web address that also has the word alpacas in there...every little helps. For example www.mulberryalpacas.com

Getting great rankings isn't a manipulation game—Google absolutely hates that game and will punish you for it if they get a whiff of it—which is perhaps what the dark element of the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) world sells. Good, in-bounds SEO is made up of smart, user-and-search-engine friendly techniques. Think of SEO as a performance-enhancing drug—one that won't get you kicked out of the Tour de France.

That being said, there are tons of things webmasters can do to help their sites perform better in search, in this series of articles we can't cover everything. However what follows is what I regard as the top strategies for better search engine—and by "search engine" I really mean "Google" – ranking. So lets get cracking...

1. Title tags

Listed by some as one of the Big Three (tags, links, and text), I'm putting title tags at the top. The words in the title tag appear in the link that pops up in the search result. This is where you tell the search engine (and the would-be visitor) as succinctly as possible what needs to be known: company or publication name; relevant, targeted keyword or keyword phrase taken from the text of the page. Each page should have a title tag as Google ranks each page individually, not the site in its entirety.

Here is the Mulberry Alpacas home page title tag:

Alpaca Farm - alpaca breeding and alpacas for sale on alpaca farm in Oregon.

What could be easier.....Marketing Alpacas #3 will be here tomorrow.

I couldn't resist....... this little bear is so adorable I had to show you his picture.



Yesterdays artice on marketing alpacas.
Marketing Alpacas - Getting Started

The theme for the blog over the next ten days will be the use of web sites for alpaca marketing.
Before we launch into the wonderful world of alpaca web sites and the Internet. You first need to have established an identity for your alpaca farm or ranch.
What is a farm identity? In practical terms it’s the logo, the colors you use and perhaps a tag line. All of which are the physical representation of your brand values. These images and words will be used on stationery, farm signs, trailers, premiums such as clothing and any other opportunity that presents its self to display your logo…such as say your alpaca ranch website…more of which later.







If you already have a farm identity, that is great. If not, then you will need to get help from a marketing professional, maybe a friend or family member has the skills you need or perhaps a fellow alpaca breeder. If not then look around for an alpaca farm that has an identity you like and find out who created it. Reaching very carefully for your check book at the same time.
For reasons that will become apparent later having the word “alpacas” in your farm name is a no brainer, so just do it.

Having fun with your logo. If you use Google then you will know that they often play around with their logo at special times of the year. With that in mind here is a fun Christmas card we designed based around our own logo. The correct logo appeared on the back of the card and on the envelope.



Okay tomorrow we can start to talk about that website which will help raise the profile of your farm and in so many different ways make it much easier to market your alpacas and any associated products or services which you plan to offer.

Happy St Patricks day.....check out the Google logo today.......